A Mobile Application for Interactive Voice Forums: Design and Pilot Deployment in Rural India

This paper describes the design and pilot deployment of a mobile application to support interactive voice forums, in which users can record messages and listen to messages that others have recorded. While such forums have typically relied on voice calls for participation, participation through a mobile application (and mobile Internet) can offer benefits in terms of costs, offline access to downloaded content, and supplements with other media types, such as photos. Using the Android platform, we implement an application to support CGNet Swara, a voice-based citizen journalism platform. We describe an early-stage pilot deployment that is already seeing unsupervised usage in rural India.